The Volcano Adventure Guide: Excellent information and background for anyone wishing to visit active volcanoes safely and enjoyably. The book presents guidelines to visiting 42 different volcanoes around the world.

Support us?

Maintaining the volcano and earthquake news sections on this website, the free Volcano Webcams tool and interactive map widget is a free-time, both time- and server cost intensive effort.If you find the information useful and would like to support us, and help keep it alive and improve it, please consider making a small donation. Thank you!

Random pictures

Illustrated Volcano Glossary

Plinian eruption

Volcanology

Plinian eruption of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980 (USGS Photograph taken on May 18, 1980, by Donald A. Swanson)

Pumice deposit on Santorini, Greece, from the large Plinian "Minoan" eruption on Santorini in 1613 BC, showing the holes in the pumice where remants of an olive tree could be found and recovered by Tom in 2003. This material allowed the most recent and most precise dating of this eruption to date.

The most explosive and largest type of volcanic eruptions. Plinian eruptions erupt more than 1 cubic kilometer of magma often within less than a few days and produce ash columns that can reach 20-50 km height.

Plinian eruptions are large explosive events that form enormous dark columns of tephra and gas high into the stratosphere (>11 km). Such eruptions are named for Pliny the Younger, who carefully described the disastrous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. This eruption generated a huge column of tephra into the sky, pyroclastic flows and surges, and extensive ash fall. Many thousands of people evacuated areas around the volcano, but about 2,000 were killed, including Pliny the Older.

Interesting facts:

Large plinian eruptions sometimes result in the withdrawal of so much magma from below a volcano that part of it collapses to form a large depression called a caldera.

Some plinian eruptions inject such large quantities of aerosols (small liquid droplets) into the stratosphere that surface temperatures on earth may decrease slightly. A few recent eruptions resulted in detectable cooling--the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, and the 1982 eruption of El Chichón, Mexico. The massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora volcano, Indonesia, is thought to have caused the 1816 "Year without a Summer" in the northeastern U.S., Canada, and western Europe.

Source: USGS

Links:

Related keywords (2):

More on VolcanoDiscovery:

Volcano Tours on Hawai'i: The Hawaiian Islands are not only home to the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island, but also boast a unique natural environment. Born by volcanic activity of a very active hot spot in the middle of the Pacific Plate, they are a showcase of natural history.

Top 20 quakes in 2016: Several magnitude 7 quakes occurred in 2016 (but none above M8): Papua New Guinea, NZ, Ecuador, Solomon Islands, Sumatra, Chile, Alaska and others - nearly all major earthquakes were located near active subduction zones.
See the top 20 list of largest quakes in 2016 with this map.

Copyrights:VolcanoDiscovery and other sources as noted.Use of material: Text and images on this webpage are copyrighted. Further reproduction and use without authorization is not consented. If you need licensing rights for photographs, for example for publications and commercial use, please contact us.